Arkansas Governor Orval Faubus
(3 of 7)
Sojourning in London, Arkansas' Democratic Senator J. William Fulbright, a segregationist by the record in spite of a long career as a self-described liberal, said he just didn'i know enough about the Arkansas situation to comment. Iowa's Democratic Governor Herschel Loveless drew a formal N.A.A.C.P. protest for his evasion ("I have enough troubles of my own without getting mixed up in this"). Democratic National Chairman Paul Butler of Indiana refused to "pass judgment" on Faubus. At week's end the Democratic Advisory Committee, including Members Harry Truman and Adlai Stevenson, finally got around to issuing a statement blaming Republican Dwight Eisenhower for the whole Arkansas mess.
Assaying the political effects, the New York Times said that Orval Faubus had knotted the "civil rights albatross firmly around the neck of the entire Democratic Party." In San Francisco, William Stratton. executive director of the Booker T. Washington Community Center, recalled that Faubus, as a Democratic "liberal," had been elected with Negro support. "Because of that," said Stratton, "we must act to analyze the attitudes of those running for office. We must do as much as we can to make sure that a Faubus doesn't exist in this area. It's foolish to be blindly tied to a party which has no concern for your welfare."
Joy in Budapest. In Little Rock, Nashville and Charlotte, the racist crowds branded those who opposed them as proCommunist. But it was, in fact, Orval Faubus and his followers who gave aid and comfort to Communism. Headlined Beirut's Communist daily AL-Shara: AMERICA VERGES ON CIVIL REBELLION. Sneered Italy's Communist L'Unità : "It is hard to imagine a country where the new scholastic year opens in an atmosphere other than serene, where the thought of desks, notebooks and blackboards is mingled with visions of rifles, tear gas, spring knives and clubs . . . Such a country does, however, exist, and it bears the high-sounding name of 'United States of America.' " In Budapest, Hungary's ruthless Premier Janos Kadar fairly kicked his heels in joy. Cried he: "Those who tolerate that a people should be persecuted because of the color of their skin have no right to preach human liberty and human rights." In the United Nations, after a dark-skinned Ceylonese delegate denounced Soviet intervention in Hungary, Bulgaria's Peter Voutov retorted: "Something worse could happen to you if you go to Little Rock."
In neutral and non-Communist countries (most of them with their own race problems), the U.N. debate on the sacking of Hungary was drowned out by the news from Little Rock. Said the Times of Indonesia: "Americans must ask themselves if a Faubus is not a greater traitor to their country than a small fry caught selling atomic data to foreign powers, and whether Governor Faubus should not be hauled before the Un-American Activities Committee for alienating half the world from the U.S." In Japan, a conservative-minded citizen asked quietly: "If Americans regard Negroes as inferior, how do they really regard Asians?" Millions of brown-skinned Asians, unaware of great U.S. constitutional issues, saw only dark-skinned American children being held away from school by the rifles of white American soldiers.